Champion skier Lindsey Vonn, now just as famous for dating Tiger Woods (inset, l.) trains at the Red Bull center and sees notorious drug doctor Bernd Pansold (r.), who spends time in jail for his involvement in doping female German athletes with muscle-building drugs without their knowledge.

THALGAU, Austria — Red Bull spares little expense for its favorite sponsored athlete, the fearless American ski racer Lindsey Vonn, girlfriend of Tiger Woods and face of the U.S. Olympic team for next winter's Sochi Games in Russia.

Each summer the Austrian energy drink company organizes a rigorous conditioning program for Vonn, lodging her at an opulent resort hotel near Innsbruck and letting her work out at the Red Bull pro soccer team's sparkling training facility near the Salzburg airport.

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Then there is Thalgau, a peaceful village on the eastern outskirts of Salzburg, where Red Bull has sent Vonn to its Diagnostics and Training Center, a secure and nondescript old tin-oxide factory that houses a state-of-the-art sports laboratory overseen by a 71-year-old German doctor named Bernd Pansold.

It is there that America's marquee Olympic star has visited the clinic of the East German doping doctor who played an instrumental role in the German Democratic Republic's notorious, state-sponsored program to dope unwitting young athletes with hardcore anabolic steroids. Thousands of young athletes were victimized, many suffering ghastly, permanent injuries in what have been described as crimes against humanity.

A Daily News investigation of Red Bull's Thalgau operation has uncovered no evidence of doping by Vonn, who has never failed a drug test. But the mere fact of Vonn's and Pansold's mutual access shows how vulnerable today's Olympic athletes are when the corporate sponsors supplying their income are accountable only to the bottom line.

Since 2005, Red Bull has paid Vonn handsomely to promote the sugary buzz and mysterious aura of its brand. But more important, she says, are the company's perks: a full-time personal trainer, a motorhome on the Alpine race circuit, occasional use of company jets, a job for her younger sister.

Vonn's publicist initially denied the 28-year-old downhiller worked with Pansold, but later said Vonn has made occasional visits to Thalgau and exchanged "nothing more than a courtesy hello" with Pansold.

At the renovated diagnostic training center facility in March, where Pansold gave an exclusive interview to a Daily News reporter, he said Vonn had visited his facility twice a year in the past.

"A very nice girl," Pansold said, emphasizing that his primary influence with Vonn's training program was through her Red Bull trainer, Martin Hager. "She visits here twice a year."

What remains unclear is how much Vonn and her advisers have known about Pansold's past. While always quick to credit Red Bull's role in her record-smashing success, Vonn hasn't publicized her visits to Thalgau, and does the majority of her workouts elsewhere, often at five-star hotels like the Hotel Schwartz near Innsbruck.

Pansold is one of hundreds of doctors and coaches who participated in the GDR's systematic doping programs. After the Cold War ended, many took their science abroad — a deep source of concern for the International Olympic Committee and anti-doping agencies.

Extensive evidence shows that Pansold was not just a passive actor in the GDR atrocities but was at the epicenter of the plan to ply female swimmers with crude and highly dangerous muscle-building drugs.

Working in close collaboration with the Stasi, East Germany's dreaded secret police, Pansold oversaw plans in the 1970s and 1980s to give teenage girls, including at least one 13-year-old, the highly toxic Oral Turinabol without their knowledge. The victims suffered side effects such as irreversibly deepened voices, liver tumors, disturbed ovulation cycles and an extreme increase in face and body hair growth.

The emotional testimony of some of the victims led to Pansold's 1998 conviction for "beihilfe zur koerperverletzung" — aiding and abetting assault.

"It was forbidden to refuse," one ex-swimmer, Christiane Knacke-Sommer, testified in a packed Berlin courtroom. "The pills and the shots, they destroyed me physically and emotionally."

To this day, the GDR's "State Plan 14.25" — a long-running effort to dominate Olympic sports through hormone manipulation — remains a Pandora's Box for the sports world, with today's dopers using the plan's techniques and substances.

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Red Bull's CEO Dietrich Mateschitz. (ANDREAS SCHAAD/AP)

For example, the chemistry that fueled the BALCO scandal was based on the same cocktails the East Germans invented — testosterone and epitestosterone in a balanced ratio to avoid laboratory detection.

By the time of his trial, Pansold was working with Austrian ski racers, including the great Hermann Maier, but the lingering horrors of State Plan 14.25 made the stigma so great that the Austrian ski team's president, Peter Schroecksnadel, officially distanced Maier and his team from Pansold in 1998.

"And since then he's with Red Bull and nobody cares about that, you know," Schroecksnadel recently told The News.

After the German Supreme Court upheld Pansold's guilty verdict in 2000, Pansold says, Red Bull CEO Dietrich Mateschitz personally recruited the doctor for the Thalgau project. Mateschitz, an avid skier who co-founded the company with the slogan "Red Bull gives you wings," is one of Austria's wealthiest men.

A Red Bull PR representative did not respond to a request for comment about Pansold and Mateschitz's hiring of the doctor.

Pansold says he and Vonn have never discussed performance-enhancing drugs or methods, and says the dark arts of doping are the farthest thing from his mind at the start of his workdays.

"For me it's finished," Pansold says. "Since I am with Red Bull nobody has come to us to say he needs something to improve performance."

Pansold is often described as a "leistungsdiagnostiker," a specialist who assesses physical testing data to identify how performance can improve. His specialty is monitoring the buildup of lactic acid to help an athlete avoid overtraining, recover faster and boost endurance.

A team of trainers and technicians at his center offer hundreds of Red Bull athletes customized guidance on maximizing their fitness.

Though he never testified at his own trial, Pansold does not deny that he was part of the madness that turned Olympic sports into a referendum on Cold War ideology and began the doping scourge that has permeated all sports since the 1970s.

Vonn relaxes after a training session. (Photo via Red Bull)

"It's very clear I was part of this system," Pansold says. "I'm a known guy, but there are 200 or 300 other people you can ask."

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That may be true, but the others don't work with Vonn, who has ruled the summit of her sport longer than any American skier.

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From 1975 through 1989, Pansold was part of SC Dynamo, a sports academy in Berlin with strong ties to the totalitarian GDR government. It was at Dynamo that shotput champion Heidi Krieger was unsuspectingly given such a heavy regimen of masculinizing steroids that she later completed the sex transition to become Andreas Krieger.

"I still say today that they killed Heidi," Krieger told the BBC recently. "Through administering these pills to me, Heidi was killed, and she's not there anymore. It's difficult to say whether I would be Heidi today or not, but I could have decided on my own. That decision was taken away from me."

Former shot putter Andreas Krieger, who competed as a woman (Heidi Krieger) on the East German track and field team, poses with a picture of himself from 1987 during an interview in his shop in Magdeburg in September of 2009. Krieger was given massive amounts of anabolic steroids by trainers at SC Dynamo, the Berlin sports club where Bernd Pansold worked as a doctor from 1975-1989. The damage may have led Krieger to have a sex change operation in 1997. (AFP/AFP/Getty Images)

Pansold was not personally implicated in Krieger's case, but as a chief doctor for Dynamo he supervised a system wherein the teenage swimmers were told the pills and injections they received were harmless vitamins.

A road map of the system resides in hundreds of pages of documents, obtained and translated by The News, that were first discovered in GDR military buildings after the Berlin Wall came down. The files cite Stasi contact reports where Pansold's code name was "Juergen Wendt."

"There is the danger to the athletes," Pansold acknowledged in one of the 1977 contact reports used at his trial. "The fundamental possibility of long-term effects and delayed effects remains (prostate cancer, liver cancer, etc.)"

In the mid-1990s, when Dynamo's victims came forward to testify about the abuses, dozens of implicated doctors and trainers had already been welcomed into national Olympic teams around the world. Pansold was operating out of an Olympic training center in Obertauern, Austria, where he worked with several members of that country's vaunted Alpine ski team.

One of those at the time was Hermann Maier, the world's preeminent ski racer. Maier had won two gold medals at the 1998 Nagano Games despite a horrifying crash, earning him the nickname "the Herminator." But Pansold's indictment inevitably led his rivals to raise public questions about his work at Obertauern — people don't make such physical gains through "pasta and granola alone," one Swiss coach told reporters.

Heidi Krieger circa 1986. (Bongarts/Getty Images)

The Obertauern clinic was not an official part of the Austrian team but rather a private clinic that the skiers visited by choice. Maier worked more closely with Pansold's colleague, Heinrich Bergmueller. Nevertheless, the pressure forced Schroecksnadel to dissuade his racers from working with Pansold.

"I said, 'OK, we can't have this guy,'" Schroecksnadel recalls. "I never met him personally. The first thing, I said, 'OK, I want to throw him out, I don't want him.' And Hermann agreed."

Fined for his crimes and sentenced to a short prison term, Pansold appealed his guilty verdict but in 2000 the German Supreme Court upheld it, with a panel of judges saying Pansold was central to a system designed to win medals through secretive doping.

"The health of the athletes was secondary," the judges wrote in their decision. "The secrecy that governed the distribution of steroids was a necessary step to protect the secrecy of the entire doping system... The athletes at hand were used as instruments of the state."

* * *

Andreas Krieger in on his way to stand witness at the trial on doping in East Germany in Berlin in May of 2000. (JOCKEL FINCK/AP)

Vonn is currently sidelined, rehabilitating a blown-out knee between red carpet appearances and trips to various golf tournaments to support her boyfriend. Woods visited Vonn in Austria in January and sent his private plane to pick her up there after her injury in February.

Vonn hopes to return to training on snow in the late summer and has vowed to be ready next February to defend the gold medal she won at the 2010 Olympic women's downhill.

The U.S. Ski Team declined to comment on Pansold. The team has outsourced some management of Vonn's career to Red Bull, a company that famously finds innovative ways to support the hundreds of athletes in its stable.

Before the 2010 Olympics, Red Bull helped snowboarder Shaun White train for the Vancouver at a private halfpipe in the Colorado backcountry. More recently, Red Bull assisted daredevil Felix Baumgartner's record-setting jump from the stratosphere. Its brand is ubiquitous in extreme sports, soccer and Formula 1.

For Vonn, Red Bull devised the Athletes Special Program, a personalized program to support Vonn on the World Cup, skiing's most elite racing tour. Overseeing the ASP program is former Austrian downhill coach Robert Trenkwalder, who calls the Thalgau center a great resource that Vonn only visits occasionally for testing.

Vonn takes first place during the Audi FIS Alpine Ski World Cup Women's Giant Slalom in March, 2012 and hopes to recover from recent knee surgery and defend gold in next winter’s Olympics in Sochi, Russia. (Jonas Ericsson/Agence Zoom/Getty Images)

"The diagnostic center is a service where you can go whenever you want," Trenkwalder says. "We test all that you need by the fitness — how fast you are, your endurance, your muscles, how much power you have."

Trenkwalder is well aware that Thalgau can lead to bad press for Vonn. Five years ago, when Vonn won her first overall World Cup title, several European newspapers mentioned the Pansold connection.

"I think one hour later, on the Internet, Swiss journalists ask, 'oh, maybe the reason is she works together with Pansold, she trains in Thalgau," Trenkwalder says. "For us it was unbelievable."

Scrutiny of any top athlete's relationship with their medical advisors is an unfortunate natural development in the wake of numerous doping programs enabled by shady doctors. Procuring doping products is easy, but the critical resource for modern doping is knowledge and advice on how to use them without detection.

Both the Mets and Yankees were alarmed three years ago to learn their players were consulting with Canadian sports medicine guru Anthony Galea, who in 2011 pleaded guilty to transporting misbranded and unapproved drugs into the United States (Woods and Alex Rodriguez were also Galea clients).

Vonn's situation differs in that the U.S. Ski Team pays her nothing, and so has none of the leverage a professional team might have to influence her choice of medical care. Red Bull does have that power.

It happens that the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is seeking to establish a new rule barring Olympic athletes from working with physicians or others who have been "criminally convicted of professionally disciplined in relation to doping." The rule appears in a draft of the 2015 WADA Code under the heading "Prohibited Association."

The proposed language for the rule says sanctions could follow if an athlete ignores written warnings for working with someone "found in a criminal, disciplinary or professional proceeding within the previous eight years to have been involved in conduct which would have constituted a violation of anti-doping rules."

The proposed rule is bound to generate controversy given that it intrudes upon an athlete's private medical choices and because it is difficult to enforce. But this is the new reality after Lance Armstrong showed how easy it is to beat the system with the help of at least one shady doctor.

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Armstrong's U.S. Postal Service cycling teams carried off what is believed to be a $100-million fraud with the help of a squad of doctors performing illicit blood transfusions in team hotels. For at least a decade, a Tour de France cyclist couldn't reach the podium without a secret medicine man in the background.

Steven Ungerleider, author of "Faust's Gold," a groundbreaking 2001 book about the East German doping machine, said of more than 400 doctors and trainers indicted for doping crimes after German reunification, only a few stood trial, while many others fled to places like Austria, Australia, Russia and China.

"There is a list of folks who are now coaching and advising Olympians on 'high performance training,'" Ungerleider says. "Perhaps with substances or not — but they are working and exporting their GDR magic."